Better
by The Little Monster 1024
Summary: Emily Raydor's thoughts as her mother speaks of divorcing her father.


**Better**

 **AN** : I know, I know, I should really update Brotherly Love before writing another oneshot. I've written about half of the chapter but the flashdrive that it's saved on is currently at my friend's house an hour away from me. I'm going to go get it this weekend.

Because my stories always reflect my mood and I've had a bad couple of weeks, this was born.

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"The relationship between parent and child is of fundamental importance to U.S. society, because it preserves the safety and provides for the nurture of dependent individuals."

Emily Raydor would always remember that line. Just before her father had left the first time, he had been looking through some law books, said he was just freshening up his memory in hopes of getting a job.

She had been sitting at the table, doing her homework before her mother got home; that had always been the rule- homework had to be completed before mom got home or no dessert after dinner.

She had always thought that rule to be absolutely ridiculous, that was until she got into high school and her mother didn't make her anymore. She had told Emily that she was old enough to know when to start her work, that time management was something important that she had to learn. After weeks of staying up far too late working on assignments she'd pushed aside, she had come to love her mother's old silly rule.

She had looked over at her father's books, reading passages here and there. That specific one caught her attention, making her reflect back on the last seven years of her life. Her parents had always made her feel safe. They always cared for her and Ricky.

She knew her parents had some faults. They argued a lot, especially recently. She knew that her mother didn't like that her father started leaving after dinner. He usually left and didn't get back until late, long after she and Ricky were to be asleep.

Sometimes she was asleep like she was supposed to be and the sound of her parents would wake her up. Her father was loud and her mother was whisper shouting. Her mom usually had her stern, 'I mean business' voice too, the one she used when she didn't do her chores like she was supposed to.

Her dad would sometimes call her mother names, the bad ones that she wasn't allowed to say. He usually said sorry after, but that didn't make her mom look any happier. A couple times, her dad tried to kiss her mom when he was sorry, but she just pushed him away.

If she slept through her father coming home, she always knew when he was in trouble because when her mom would wake her up for school, her father would be sleeping on the couch during breakfast. Her mom always pretended like nothing was wrong.

As she got older and her father was gone more often than he was home, she continued to think about the passage.

She had felt safe and nurtured, but not by both of her parents. Maybe when she was younger she'd felt safe in her father's arms, but she couldn't remember that far back.

She remembered having a nightmare and crawling into bed with her mother. She could remember skinning her knee on the sidewalk, only to have her mother rush to her side. She could remember her mother working hard all day, coming home looking exhausted and then turning around and making them dinner. It was her mother that brushed her hair, her mother that gave Ricky baths. Her mother had been the one to take them to the park, teach them both how to throw a baseball. She drove them to school, she packed their lunches.

Emily had always felt safe and loved, but only by her mother.

When she was a young teenager, she often wondered what she and Ricky had done to deserve such little love from their father. What had their mother done to deserve being abandoned with two young kids to take care of?

She spent far too many nights lying in bed, hating herself before she realized that the only one to blame was her father.

Her father left them. Not because of any inadequacies on their parts, but because he loved his addictions more than he'd ever loved them.

As she became an adult and began to take on the world on her own, she decided that abandoning them was the best thing that Jack Raydor could have done for their family. In leaving them, he made his kids appreciate the woman he had taken for granted, had made them tougher.

Jack Raydor had made them more cautious, more wary of trust. That was something their mother was struggling with. A part of her hated how jaded her kids were, that they had such a hard time placing trust in their romantic partners or even friends for that matter. But in her line of work, she knew what happened to those who didn't take the proper precautions.

In the same way, Jack had, in being the complete opposite, showed them how they should be in a relationship. What they knew and saw of their parents' marriage had been completely one-sided. They grew up knowing that their mother deserved so much better. The Raydor children knew that a relationship was a team effort, that they had to talk when things got rough. They knew that they wouldn't make the mistakes their father had.

Because of all of this, she couldn't have been happier when her mother had approached her about divorcing her father. She knew Ricky was struggling with it, but he would come around. Not only had Jack been a bad father, he'd been an even worse husband.

They had thought it all through growing up; their mother deserved so much better. And so did they.

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 **Wow, this was just a rambling mess. Hope you guys like it.**


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